L’E3 vist per Forbes. Born to Sell: How Indie Games Went Mainstream At E3

The idea of an “indie” has always been reactionary, an attempt to reverse the momentum of industrialization by stripping creative production to a poetic minimum. The indie designer has become a romantic fixation for videogame culture in recent years, something that’s given an industry calcifying around expensive sequels a sense of creative momentum and social purpose it wouldn’t otherwise have had. The improbable successes of Minecraft, Braid, Gone Home and Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP show that it’s not the commercialization of creative sharing that’s corrupt, but only the industry’s least ethical practitioners, the handful of conglomerates like Ubisoft and EA and Activision.

It’s too easy to see the indie ethic as the antithesis of industrialized creativity, looking past the fact that indie and conglomerate are built on the same intrusive market structure that insists community participation should be bisected by a paywall. As has been the case in every industry of mass produced culture, the “indie” is inevitably just a tributary to a bigger market, less a correction to what is broken than an extension of it, ennobling the entrepreneurial at the most intimate levels. (…)

L’E3 vist per The NewYork Times. E3 Still Dazzles, Even as Video Game Sales Go Digital

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, the video game industry’s annual convention, is very good at a certain ritual: building hype for big-budget games — more often than not for consoles — just before summer starts, so publishers can maximize their sales when games land on store shelves for the holidays.

E3, which wrapped up on Thursday, is the place where games publishers try to outdo one another with the most dazzling demonstrations of their coming titles to get the press corps excited. It’s where they pump up retailers to order lots of copies of games and support them with midnight store openings, big in-store displays and other marketing gimmicks.

While the breadth of console games at the convention is exhaustive and exhausting — earplugs are advised — it represents only a piece of the games business, one that has not been growing for years. Other faster-growing sectors of the business, like mobile games, are a far smaller part of the show.

“So far, it’s two different industries,” said Evan Wilson, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities, who attended E3. “The success we’ve seen in new businesses — social, mobile and online free-to-play stuff — that revenue is being generated by and large by companies not at E3.” (…)